TECH CHRONICLES

A daily dose of postings from The Chronicle's technology blog (sfgate.com/blogs/tech)

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, March 1, 2008

MySpace hosts developer jam

In the spirit of Silicon Valley "hackathons," iPhoneDevCamps and Facebook Developers Garages, MySpace is hosting its first developers get-together in San Francisco today.

The all-day "devJam" will take place at MySpace's new San Francisco office as it tries to encourage outside developers to create programs for the social-networking site.

Just as Facebook opened up its platform to outside developers last year, MySpace unveiled its platform to developers in early February. It plans to release the results to users this month.

Though MySpace already allows widgets - programs such as photo slide shows, games and other bling to dress up a person's profile page - the new initiative will make it easier for users to add the applications to their site.

Today's San Francisco devJam, followed by another in Seattle in mid-March, will offer tutorials from MySpace engineers and an opportunity for developers to design an application, collaborate with other developers, and share them with the audience by the end of the day.